Asa Butterfield and Jude Law - Courtesy of Press Office

Jude Law - Courtesy of Press Office

Asa Butterfield and Chloë Grace Moretz - Courtesy of Press Office

Ben Kingsley and Chloë Grace Moretz - Courtesy of Press Office

With a record number of 2012 Oscar nominations – 11, including for costume design (Sandy Powell) and set (Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo), as well as for film, screenplay, director and score – on top of the Golden Globe for best director and plaudits from the American press, Hugo has finally arrived in Italian cinemas.

The imaginative story is taken from the best-selling novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. It’s about an orphan (Asa Buttefield, the star of the moving The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) who lives hidden in the Gare du Nord in Paris in the early 30s, surviving by pilfering, taking care of the clocks in the station and hoping to be able to make a robot that his father left him work. Help arrives in the form of Isabelle (the increasingly famous Chloe Moretz), a girl who’s the same age as him.

Her father is George Méliès (Ben Kingsley), the French director – a contemporary of the Lumière brothers, the inventors of the cinema – who opened the door to illusionist cinema and special effects. It’s Scorsese’s tribute (and before him, the writer Selznick’s) to Méliès. The film tells a fictional version of his life story – from successful author to seller of toys and sweets in a Paris station – and also makes visual reference to him, with images from A Trip to the Moon, his 1902 masterpiece, which features a rocket crashing on an anthropomorphic moon.

To reproduce the magic and the inventions of Méliès’ films, immerse the audience in the atmosphere of the 30s and create a dreamlike world, Scorsese used 3D for the first time, an artistic choice like Wim Wenders’, who used 3D for his Pina, a film about the art of Pina Bausch. Scorsese selected a star-studded cast: as well as Kingsley, the film features Sacha Baron Cohen in the role of the wicked train inspector andJude Law as Hugo’s father, alongside Johnny Depp, Emily Mortimer, Christopher Lee and Michael Pitt.